This chapter focuses on the output of artists who have worked with elements of the Cornish landscape, its geology, and its prehistoric monuments as a means of engaging with magic and mysticism. Such engagements are however rarely considered through the lens of the Gothic. Often, and instead, this type of work is seen in the terms of neo-pagan culture, Celtic studies, neo-romanticism, or, more simply, as fine art or poetry. However, as we show, if we regard this body of work in relation to Gothic tropes, concerns, and modalities, we can gain a better grasp of the wide scope of Gothic's reach into all kinds of fields of creative activity, and not just within popular fiction.

Gothic studies concepts of otherness, animism, and the sublime provide the theoretical foundation for the chapter's critical engagement with such work. Reference to these terms will help us to map the affiliations of such work to the peculiar nature of the Cornish Gothic. In addition, our focus will fall not just on the artistic end-product as text or artefact but also on the methods and contexts that are employed to produce them. These methods are integral to the cross-over between magical and artistic practice. We will therefore pay specific attention to an artistic working practice that we will call an ‘aesthetics of emergence’. We argue that such emergent practice can itself be usefully claimed for Gothic with the technique used by many of the visual artists referred to in this chapter. As the chapter goes on to explore, emergent practice is often used to generate a strong imaginative and phantasmagorical communication with the specifics of place. It is employed often as a method of engagement with the occult (as in divining that which is hidden, obscure, or not perceptible with the usual senses), and is used as a means of embracing the creative power of the irrational and the happenstance. As such, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that both automatism, as an artistic technique, and animism carry with them a special relationship with Gothic and that they are integral to a characteristic creative engagement with the Cornish landscape and its mythos.